News

Shortlisted in UK Stock Market Awards

09 January 2015 | Mentions of Liberum

(LONDON) THE initial public offering of GAME Digital plc in 2014, on which UK independent investment bank Liberum acted as joint bookrunner, is among the nominations for the 2015 UK Stock Market Awards.

Liberum is broker to four companies on the shortlist: Workspace, Ted Baker, Manx Telecom and GAME Digital.

It is also nominated as Best Adviser – Corporate Sponsors.

The nominations are made by the public and “is testament to the huge value that UK PLC brings to Britain”, according to Awards co-sponsor KPMG.

Judges meet in February to chose the winners in 23 categories and the Awards take place on March 26 in London.

UK energy policy: Atherton's 10 thoughts after 10 years

28 November 2014 | Mentions of Liberum

Liberum Utilities Analyst Peter Atherton will speak Monday at The Spectator Energy Forum where political leaders, investors, analysts and advisors involved in energy policy and business will meet to explore how to fix Britain’s energy market. Those wishing to attend can click on the image below to book tickets.

Here's Peter's overview in advance of the event.

“IN 2003 the EU, including the UK, decided to lead the world in decarbonising its economy in an attempt to combat climate change. To achieve this, the UK has adopted a radical energy policy that seeks to move from a power system that is today overwhelmingly based on fossil fuels, with some nuclear and a small amount of renewables, to one overwhelmingly based on renewables and nuclear power.

What’s more this transformation is to be achieved by the year 2030 – a breakneck pace for an industry such as power generation.

The UK’s climate change-focused energy policy has now been in place for over a decade and there are 10 conclusions that can be drawn from the experience.

UK/EU policy makers grossly underestimated the engineering, financial, and economic challenges posed by the drive to de-carbonise the electricity sector by 2030.

Policy makers have failed to take into account the huge changes in the economic, commodity and financial environments since 2003 and adjust policy accordingly.

The policy framework does not, and cannot, take proper account of security of supply and energy affordability.

The gigantic £350bn investment needed by 2030 cannot be financed at a cost that the public is willing to bear.

The policy requires the building of fundamentally uneconomic assets and therefore the government has had to intervene in the market in ever-more aggressive ways. Intervention has begotten intervention.

It is now impossible for any power station to be built unless government underwrites the economics.

The economic case for being in the vanguard of decarbonisation looks very poor and was based on two false premises, namely a) that fossil fuels prices would rise to unaffordable levels, b) being first mover would result in considerable industrial benefits. Both of these assertions have been found to be wrong so far.

The worst effects of the policy lie in the future.

A client state of rent seekers has been created by the over-€50bn per annum of largely renewable subsidy stream across the EU. The lobbying power of the rent seekers greatly outweighs that of the consumer, meaning that necessary policy corrections are not made.

To deal with the affordability issue, either the policy needs to be restructured to lower costs, or the British public need to be convinced this is a price worth paying."

More names announced at Spectator Energy Forum

24 November 2014 | events

Greencoat Capital Managing Partner Richard Nourse, Joan MacNaughton, Executive Chair of the World Energy Trilemma for the World Energy Council, and Cheniere Energy Director James Ball are among a raft of new names set to speak at The Spectator Energy Conference, sponsored by Liberum, and taking place in the City of London on December 1.

Political leaders, investors, analysts and advisors involved in energy policy and business will meet to explore how to fix Britain’s energy market and understand what is happening to the geopolitics of energy. Those wishing to attend can go here to book >

Other speakers include Tom Howes, Deputy Head of Unit, Energy Policy and Monitoring, European Commission, Rt Hon David Lidington MP, Minister for Europe, Rhian Kelly, Director for Business Environment, CBI, David Clark, Chair, Russia Foundation and Stephen Tindale, Associate Fellow, Centre for European Reform.

The afternoon session sets the scene for the domestic energy debate in the UK ahead of the May 2015 general election and it will cover just how broken the energy market is here, what market reform would produce the best energy mix, supply options such as shale gas and nuclear power and the promise new technologies hold.

The morning session is devoted to the geopolitics of energy and will discuss European energy policy, supply flow threats and the US energy revolution.

How Lewis Carroll would’ve relished the UK energy story!

18 November 2014 | Mentions of Liberum

Liberum Utilities Analyst Peter Atherton will be speaking at The Spectator Energy Conference on December 1 in London. The event, entitled Fixing Britain's Energy Market, is chaired by Andrew Neil and features policy makers, investors and company executives. To register, click here >. Liberum is sponsoring the event.

Below is an opinion written by Peter:

"This past year I’ve published more than 40 pieces on utilities and it’s fair to say that I now know how Alice felt tumbling down the rabbit hole.

She was chasing a rabbit that bore a resemblance to domestic energy policy these past two decades: “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”

“If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later,” she observes.

Curiouser and curiouser.

She finds herself playing croquet with the politicians: “I don’t think they play at all fairly…and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can’t hear oneself speak” Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.

What lessons had those players learned, she wondered: 'Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied; 'and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.'

So much for them. Now the consumers were on the march. We want lower emissions and cheap energy, they demanded. Alice laughed. “One can’t believe impossible things.” The Queen harrumphed..”Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

We reach Chapter 11: Who stole the profits? Who indeed. The King sits in judgment of the utility bosses: “Give your evidence. And don’t be nervous or I’ll have you executed on the spot.” Alice knew how they felt. “I can't go back to yesterday,” she said, “because I was a different person then.”

Finally, dressed not in her white apron but a twin-set and pearls and carrying the minister’s briefing notes in a natty Burberry folder, Alice came to a fork in the road.

'Which road do I take?' she asked. 'Where do you want to go?' responded the Cheshire Cat. 'I don't know,' Alice answered.

Ian Whittaker named City AM Analyst of The Year

14 November 2014 | Mentions of Liberum

Liberum Media Analyst Ian Whittaker won CityAM’s Analyst of the Year Award for 2014 Thursday night, with his high-profile analysis around companies such as ITV, Pearson and Vivendi reaping plaudits from the judges.

"Ian has done brilliantly, really raised his own profile and that of the firm," the judging panel said.

Ian was one of two Liberum analysts on a shortlist of five, the second consecutive year that he made the cut.

Liberum Utilities Analyst Peter Atherton was on a shortlist of analysts that CityAM said "all stand out for their impressive foresight in their respective sectors and their revered reputations in the industry." They are "truly at the top of their game," it added.

Ian’s award caps the most successful year in Liberum’s history and follows its best results in the 2014 Thomson Reuters Extel Survey, the annual analyst surveys which rank broker and independent research based on the responses from more than 16,000 fund managers and institutional investors. It rose to second place in the key category: Leading Pan European brokerage firm - UK Small & Mid Caps. In 2013, Liberum ranked fifth.

About Liberum

Liberum is expanding its equities research coverage into Continental European large cap companies and recently started analysis of Nestle, Reckitt Benckiser, RWE, E.ON, JC Decaux and Stroer and others, with more to come in the weeks ahead.

We trade in more than 900 stocks in 15 European markets and access 24 markets with our low-touch electronic services. We are a pan-European investment bank founded in 2007 providing research, sales, trading and corporate advice to European and North American institutional investors and companies. We cover 334 stocks in 18 sectors with 42 analysts and are owned by our 172 staff. The bank has been involved in 25 IPOs and raised £1.7 billion for clients in the year to October 2014.

Trading: Liberum launches LibBlock using Turquoise Block Discovery™

Liberum is to meet strong client demand for better liquidity in the trading of large blocks using the new Turquoise Block Discovery™ service, one of the first brokers to be able to offer it.

The development of LibBlock, Liberum's proprietary routing tool, opens up a new destination for large-block trades that meets buy-side demand for priority by size, which can boost fill rates for larger orders. Minimum execution sizes can also be defined, contributing to lowering the end-to-end cost of trading.

Liberum, a seven-year-old independent London investment bank, is one of the first brokers to be able to offer the service.

“Regulatory changes are beginning to meaningfully impact the electronic trading landscape, and Turquoise Block Discovery™ is a smart mechanism to meet demand for block trades at mainstream destinations,” Liberum’s Head of Trading, Dominic Lowres, said.

“We’ve seen remarkably strong support from our clients for what this service can potentially offer,” Lowres (pictured below) added.

“Turquoise is delighted Liberum is adding Turquoise Block Discovery™ to enhance service to customers that know Liberum for its strength in UK Small and Mid Cap securities with plans to grow in European names and sectors. Turquoise Block Discovery™ is an innovation responding to investor demand for large-in-scale trading and MiFID II.” said Robert Barnes, Chief Executive Officer of Turquoise.

LibBlock is available to clients as a third route to dark liquidity. This is in addition to LibDX1 and LibMid which means that the full optimized suite of dark venue access across all trade sizes is available in one place with one set of proprietary tools.

Turquoise Block Discovery™ aims to increase probability of anonymous matching in larger sized orders within Turquoise Uncross™, the periodic random uncrossing mechanism within the Turquoise Midpoint Dark Book. Turquoise Block Discovery™ identifies potential matches from block indications and firm resting orders in Turquoise Uncross™, where members have opted in to use the service. If a potential match is found, the owner of the original indication has 0.5 seconds to send a firm qualifying block order to Turquoise Uncross™, thereby maximising available liquidity for customers of both services.

About Liberum

Liberum, voted this year as the number two Small & Mid Cap Brokerage in the Thomson Reuters Extel survey of institutional investors, is expanding into Continental European large cap companies and recently began coverage of companies such as RWE, E.ON, JC Decaux and Stroer, with more to come in the coming weeks.

We trade in more than 900 stocks in 15 European markets and access 24 markets with our low-touch electronic services. We are a pan-European investment bank founded in 2007 providing research, sales, trading and corporate advice to European and North American institutional investors and companies. We cover 334 stocks in 18 sectors with 42 analysts and are owned by our 172 staff. The bank has been involved in 25 IPOs and raised £1.7 billion for clients in the year to October 2014.

About Turquoise

Turquoise is the pan-European equities multi¬lateral trading facility majority owned by London Stock Exchange Group in partnership with the user community. Turquoise provides members with a single connection to trade shares, deposi¬tory receipts and exchange-traded funds of 18 European countries with an efficient trading and interoperable post-trade model that delivers economies of scale. Mem¬bers include banks, brokers, specialist trading firms and retail intermediaries.

Liberum Capital Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority / Registered in England & Wales No. 5912554 / Liberum Capital Inc. is a FINRA Member Firm and is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)